Best Citation Awards

You might feel a spark when you talk to your crush, but living things don’t require romance to make electricity. A study published October 24 in iScience suggests that the electricity naturally produced by swarming insects like honeybees and locusts is an unappreciated contributor to the overall electric charge of the atmosphere. “Particles in the atmosphere easily charge up,” says Joseph Dwyer, a physicist at the University of New Hampshire in Durham who was not involved with the study. “Insects are little particles moving around the atmosphere.” Despite this, the potential that insect-induced static electricity plays a role in the atmosphere’s electric field, which influences how water droplets form, dust particles move and lightning strikes brew, hasn’t been considered before, he says. Scientists have known about the minuscule electric charge carried by living things, such as insects, for a long time. However, the idea that an electric bug-aloo could alter the charge in the air ...

Wind turbines could offer a double whammy in the fight against climate change. Besides harnessing wind to generate clean energy , turbines may help to funnel carbon dioxide to systems that pull the greenhouse gas out of the air ( SN: 8/10/21 ). Researchers say their simulations show that wind turbines can drag dirty air from above a city or a smokestack into the turbines’ wakes. That boosts the amount of CO 2 that makes it to machines that can remove it from the atmosphere. The researchers plan to describe their simulations and a wind tunnel test of a scaled-down system at a meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics in Indianapolis on November 21. Addressing climate change will require dramatic reductions in the amount of carbon dioxide that humans put into the air — but that alone won’t be enough ( SN: 3/10/22 ). One part of the solution could be direct air capture systems that remove some CO 2 from the atmosphere ( SN: 9/9/22 ). But the large amou...

  The Chancellor’s Citation for Excellence seeks to recognize members of the University community who have made invaluable contributions to Syracuse University in two overarching ways—first through commitment to scholarship and research that contributes to new understandings of the world and creative responses to its needs; and second, through advancing the four pillars Chancellor Kent Syverud has identified to foster excellence at Syracuse University. Those four pillars of excellence are providing an outstanding undergraduate experience; empowering research excellence; fostering change and innovation; and positioning Syracuse as the best university in the world for veterans. The deadline for nominations for the 2022-23 Chancellor’s Citation for Excellence is Friday, Dec. 9, at 5 p.m. Nomination requirements are available on the Chancellor’s Citation  webpage . Completed nominations may be submitted via email to Faculty Affairs ( facultyaffairs@syr.edu , cc:  ajbielow@syr...

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          ...

ScinceFather A new study that reveals under-citation of women physicists invites individual and journal-level action to tackle discrimination. It is well-known that women are underrepresented in physics and can face bias and discrimination. Studies are increasingly reporting on the many ways in which this discrimination occurs. Although diversity considerations are becoming more common — for example, through mandates requiring gender-balanced conference speaker lists — there are many subtler manifestations of gender disparities in science. One symptom of gender bias is the under-citation of papers authored by women, which is demonstrated in a Perspective in this issue of  Nature Physics  through an extensive analysis of over one million physics papers. Erin Teich and colleagues analysed papers published between 1995 and 2020 in 35 physics journals. The author gender was inferred from the author forename. Although this method is not always accurate and does not take i...

                                                                                                                                                                       ScienceFather                                                                               ...

Mountain lions have no interest in people, or the built-up areas we enjoy. But after a 2018 wildfire in California, local lions took more risks, crossing roads more often and moving around more in the daytime , scientists report October 20 in Current Biology . It’s another way the effects of human development could be putting pressure on vulnerable wildlife — in this case, potentially pushing them toward our bumpers. The Woolsey Fire began near Los Angeles on November 8, 2018, and burned more than 36,000 hectares in the Santa Monica Mountains. Nearly 300,000 people evacuated, and three people died. Animals fled the fire too, including the local mountain lions ( Puma concolor ). The fire was a tragedy, but also a scientific opportunity, says Rachel Blakey, a global change biologist at UCLA. Many of the lions wore tracking collars, allowing scientists to study how the fire changed their behavior. Of the 11 collared cougars in the area at the time, nine made it to safety during the fire...

The brightest gamma-ray burst ever recorded recently lit up a distant galaxy — and astronomers have nicknamed it the BOAT, for Brightest of All Time. “We use the boat emoji a lot when we’re talking about it” on the messaging app Slack, says astronomer Jillian Rastinejad of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Gamma-ray bursts are energetic explosions that go off when a massive star dies and leaves behind a black hole or neutron star ( SN: 11/20/19; SN: 8/2/21 ). The collapse sets off jets of gamma rays zipping away from the poles of the former star. If those jets happen to be pointed right at Earth, astronomers can see them as a gamma-ray burst. This new burst , officially named GRB 221009A, was probably triggered by a supernova giving birth to a black hole in a galaxy about 2 billion light-years from Earth, researchers announced October 13. Astronomers think it released as much energy as roughly three suns converting all of their mass to pure energy. NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swi...

For people haunted by recurring nightmares, untroubled sleep would be a dream come true. Now in a small experiment, neuroscientists have demonstrated a technique that, for some, may chase the bad dreams away. Enhancing the standard treatment for nightmare disorder with a memory-boosting technique cut down average weekly nightmares among a few dozen people from three to near zero , researchers report online October 27 in Current Biology . “The fact that they could actually make a big difference in the frequency of those nightmares is huge,” says Gina Poe, a neuroscientist at UCLA who wasn’t involved in the study. People with nightmare disorder fear the night not for the monsters under the bed, but the monsters in their dreams. Frequent, terrifying dreams disturb sleep and even affect well-being in waking life. The go-to nightmare disorder treatment is imagery rehearsal therapy, or IRT. In this treatment, patients reimagine nightmares with a positive spin, mentally rehearsing the new ...

A new kind of “gold standard” could soon permeate the whiskey industry. Whiskey distillers typically age spirits in charred, wooden casks for years, allowing the liquor to gradually absorb flavorful chemicals released from the wood ( SN: 10/31/19 ). Now, researchers have demonstrated that swirling gold ions into a whiskey can reveal how much flavor the liquor has taken in — a quality called agedness. The method could provide master blenders with a quick and inexpensive test for whiskey agedness , researchers report October 6 in ACS Applied Nano Materials . “A tiny amount of gold gives you this really bright, strong, red or blue or purple color,” says William Peveler, a chemist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. The stronger the color, and the quicker that color arises, the more aged the whiskey, he says. Master blenders sometimes conduct tasting sessions to gauge agedness, but this process can be labor intensive. Alternatively, laboratory assays can measure agedness by check...

Particles raining down from space offer 3-D views inside swirling tropical storms. Muons created from cosmic rays that smash into Earth’s upper atmosphere have revealed the inner workings of cyclones over Japan, researchers report October 6 in Scientific Reports . The new imaging approach could lead to a better understanding of storms, the researchers say, and offer another tool to help meteorologists forecast the weather. “Cosmic rays are sustainable natural resources that can be used everywhere on this planet for 24 hours [a day],” says geophysicist Hiroyuki Tanaka of the University of Tokyo, so it’s just a matter of taking advantage of them. Muons offer a glimpse inside storms because variations in air pressure and density change the number of particles that make it through a tempest. By counting how many muons arrived at a detector on the ground in Kagoshima, Japan as cyclones moved past, Tanaka and colleagues produced rough 3-D maps of the density of air inside the storms. The...

U.S. millennials are rejecting suburbia and moving back to the city. That was a prevailing idea in 2019, when I started as the social sciences reporter at Science News . But when I began digging into a possible story on the phenomenon, I encountered an incoherent mess. Some research showed that suburbs were growing, others that suburbs were shrinking and yet others showed growth in both suburbs and cities. Unable to make sense of that maze of findings, I shelved the story idea. Then, several months later, I stumbled across a Harvard University white paper explaining that disagreement in the field stems from competing definitions of what distinguishes a city from a suburb. Some researchers define the suburbs as areas falling outside census-designated cities. Others look only for markers of suburbanism, such as a wealth of single-family houses and car-based commutes, the researchers wrote. I have encountered this type of fuzziness around definitions of all sorts of terms and concepts ...

It was the rift watched ‘round the world. In July 2017, after weeks of anticipation, a massive iceberg about the size of Delaware split from the Antarctic Peninsula ( SN: 7/12/17 ). Satellite images show that the orphaned iceberg, known as A68, ultimately disintegrated in the Southern Ocean. Now, researchers say they have pieced together the powerful forces that led to that final breakup. Polar scientist Alex Huth of Princeton University and colleagues combined observations of the iceberg’s drift with simulations of ocean currents and wind stress. Iceberg A68a, the largest remaining chunk of the original berg, was caught in a tug-of-war of ocean currents, and the strain of those opposing forces probably pulled the iceberg apart , the team reports October 19 in Science Advances . After A68’s separation from the Larsen C ice shelf, researchers had questions — such as what creatures live on the seafloor in the ice’s dark shadow ( SN: 2/8/19 ). As for the iceberg itself, it took a whi...

DENVER — A hidden landscape riddled with landslides is coming into focus in Yellowstone National Park, thanks to a laser-equipped airplane. Scientists of yore crisscrossed Yellowstone on foot and studied aerial photographs to better understand America’s first national park. But today researchers have a massive new digital dataset at their fingertips that’s shedding new light on this nearly 1-million-hectare natural wonderland. These observations of Yellowstone have allowed a pair of researchers to pinpoint over 1,000 landslides within and near the park , hundreds of which had not been mapped before, the duo reported October 9 at the Geological Society of America Connects 2022 meeting. Most of these landslides likely occurred thousands of years ago, but some are still moving. Mapping Yellowstone’s landslides is important because they can cripple infrastructure like roadways and bridges. The millions of visitors that explore the park each year access Yellowstone through just a handfu...

The Song of the Cell Siddhartha Mukherjee Scribner, $32.50 In the summer of 1960, doctors extracted “crimson sludge” from 6-year-old Barbara Lowry’s bones and gave it to her twin. That surgery, one of the first successful bone marrow transplants, belied the difficulty of the procedure. In the early years of transplantation, scores of patients died as doctors struggled to figure out how to use one person’s cells to treat another. “Cell therapy for blood diseases had a terrifying birth,” Siddhartha Mukherjee writes in his new book, The Song of the Cell . The transplant story is one of many Mukherjee uses to put human faces and experiences at the heart of medical progress. But what radiates off the pages is the author himself. An oncologist, researcher and Pulitzer Prize–winning author, Mukherjee’s curiosity and wisdom add pep to what, in less dexterous hands, might be dry material. He finds wonder in every facet of cell biology, inspiration in the people working in this field and...